Embodiments herein generally relate to workflows and services and more particularly to presenting service providers with an intuitive and natural system and method for registering their service in a way that easily creates a service database entry and that processes the service being registered into existing classification structures.
Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) are an essential part of modern businesses as they attempt to streamline and automate as much as possible the complex workflows and interactions between human and software systems. BPM encompasses a wide range of activities, from abstracting processes or process requirements into service and workflow definitions, to translating those abstract definitions into formal process descriptions, to eventually concretizing and executing those processes within a framework that supports their orchestration.
BPMS allow orchestrating services into workflows that achieve business transactions. In order to reuse workflow definitions, for example for multiple domains within an organization, current business process design platforms either do not require any effort from the provider to configure their services or they require services to be developed or adapted specifically to meet the functional and reusability needs of a business process.
Business process design platforms allow orchestrating services into workflows that achieve business transactions. There are processes, e.g. document workflows, that are applicable in multiple domains within an organization, but this requires the reuse of workflow definitions which currently implies either the adaptation of individual services, or the manual selection of alternative services suited to each domain.
Specifically, from a workflow reusability point of view, the current business process design platforms fall under one of the two following categories. In the first category are platforms that do not require any effort from the provider to configure their services to the needs of a particular business process, e.g. allowing importing WSDL interfaces of the services to be orchestrated and automatically generating stubs for service invocation. As a consequence, the services and the bindings within a workflow definition must be changed for each application of the workflow. In the second category are platforms where services must be developed or adapted specifically to meet the functional and reusability needs of a business process require defining Java services and wrappers to enable the engine to interact with the services. This puts an extra burden on the service provider.